On Sunday morning, I led a workshop on the Mozilla Drumbeat project Peer 2 Peer University School of Webcraft. I was very pleased to have 20+ attendees show up to the AMC Media Lab bright and early on the last day of the conference. Below are some highlights from the workshop, including questions and critiques, course suggestions and an early start on a new course called Open Web Toolkit.
After a round of introductions and ice breakers (“What’s your favorite thing that you can do with the web – your web super power?”), I started us off with a brief description Mozilla Drumbeat, and then we dug in to discuss the School of Webcraft and begin to brainstorm the kinds of courses and other support that the School will need to be successful.
For the uninitiated, Mozilla Drumbeat is supporting a new Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU) project, the School of Webcraft. While anyone can use P2PU to organize a course on any topic, we are working with them to create their first comprehensive set of courses that will allow anyone (with the connection and bandwidth) to study web development and become proficient in open web technology.
After introducing the concept, I asked the participants to brainstorm potential challenges for this model. Here are a few main questions that came up:
- Why should people trust the course content? I think that once people get used to working through P2PU, they will see that the course content is transparent and open to review and improvement (a little like Wikipedia), and every course organizer(P2PU-speak for “teacher”) will be open to improvements as their courses develop.
- What about accessibility? People wondered about issues like basic web access, disabilities, different learning styles, and the range of potential learners’ starting points (think prerequisites). In that order, I suggested that P2PU won’t solve the web access problem, but that I hope in the long run that we can partner with community technology centers and libraries to provide the necessary connectivity. I wasn’t aware of P2PU’s strategy for supporting people with disabilities, but would check into it (starting with this blog post, which is going to the P2PU team). I believe that P2PU course organizers will get better over time at working with diverse learning styles; as a volunteer effort (course organizers are unpaid, co-learners with the other participants), we will probably struggle with this for a while. Finally, I mentioned that P2PU course descriptions give a pretty clear indication of previous knowledge participants will need to be successful in a course. Questions around language and culture differences came up, too. I know that the P2PU team is working hard on these issues, and that we should see courses in Spanish and Portuguese pretty early on.
- Are P2PU courses focused on book learning or hands-on experience? Definitely, the latter. Participants should finish all School of Webcraft courses with at least one project they built for every course and leave the program with a portfolio, a key piece for moving from education to employment.
- Is the School of Webcraft accredited? This is a big, big question in the open education movement – how do we compete with the traditional institutions that have a kind of monopoly on accreditation. It’s also one of the main reasons that Mozilla Drumbeat is investing in Webcraft – we believe that we can organize all the big players in the open source space to create a peer-recognized certification that anyone should be proud to put on their resume. Apparently, we aren’t without precedent in this area. One workshop participant pointed out that CompTIA’s certification services began in a similar, peer-driven manner. If you are interested in the accreditation question, please leave a comment or contact me, as that conversation is ongoing.
Then, with just a little time left, we got onto the really good stuff: brainstorming the kinds of things people wanted to see offered through the School of Webcraft.
